Abstract

Is social science history a dated fad, or has it been so fully accepted as to have become uncontroversial? Is it more or less popular with professors and graduate students today than in the recent past? Is its status higher at the most prestigious universities, or among their graduates, than at less highly-ranked colleges? What do historians and other social scientists see as the strengths and weaknesses, the achievements and deficiencies of social science history (hereafter referred to as "ssh")? To what degree do more traditional historians agree or disagree with social scientific historians and historically-oriented social scientists about these matters? How widespread is the teaching of statistics and theory in history departments, and how sophisticated is it, compared to the offerings in social science departments? Has the field become truly interdisciplinary?

Revised. Original dated to March 1988.
I want to thank several colleagues for very useful comments on draft versions of the questionnaire and the paper: Lance Davis, Nick Dirks, Phil Hoffman, James Lee, and Doug Rivers. My largest debt is to the 304 respondents to the survey, many of whose marginal remarks have affected my interpretation of the results. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Social Science History Convention in 1987.
Published as Kousser, J. Morgan. "The state of social science history in the late 1980s." Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 22, no. 1 (1989): 13-20.